Wages in the public sector are often set on the basis of comparisons with compensation in the private sector. There are reasons to suspect that this approach may result in government pay schedules that exceed those in the private sector. In this paper, with a human capital model of wage...

Recent trends toward earlier retirement threaten future supplies of labor and the financial stability of many of our public and private pension systems. One of the few federal efforts now in place to reverse this trend has been the 1977 law outlawing mandatory retirement before age 70 for most...

In this paper we argue that mandatory retirement is only one aspect of a much broader system that influences an individual's retirement decision. We look at responses over time to variations in mandatory retirement rules faced by a sample of private-sector workers aged 62-64 in 1973. This is...